How digital health could improve cancer care
Digital health isn’t solely limited to smartwatches and wearables. It has real potential to help diagnose and treat a range of serious conditions – cancer being amongst these.
Helping to find the technologies that could transform how cancer is looked at clinically is the Cancer Innovation Challenge.
Launched in March 2017, the Cancer Innovation Challenge is a project designed to encourage the development of innovations across Scotland to help care for people with the disease.
So far, five projects have been selected by the Cancer Innovation Challenge, all of which are utilising digital technology solutions in their approaches to help clinicians tackle the disease.
The five projects were awarded between £35,000 to £100,000 to further develop and demonstrate the feasibility of their technologies.
The fab five
Amongst the projects is an app developed by Px HealthCare to encourage breast cancer patients to notify the Cancer Treatment Helpline when certain symptoms occur. The OWise app provides clinicians with a real-time view of patient reported outcomes and integrates with NHS Scotland’s patient management system, TrakCare.
My Clinical Outcomes (MCO) is a web-based platform that has patients take regular assessments to see what impact their condition is having on their life. The tool is being piloted at NHS Ayrshire and Arran and is tailored for patients in Scotland with any cancer type. Clinicians can use the information from MCO to see how effective treatments are and to inform ongoing clinical decisions.
Both projects record “Patient-Reported Outcome Measures” (PROMs) and “Patient-Report Experience Measures (PREMs). The hope is that by allowing cancer patients to record symptoms such as pain, nausea or tiredness when they experience them, doctors can gain a more accurate understanding of what treatments work best and how patients respond to them.
Digital tools such as those that Px HealthCare and MCO are using have been shown to extend cancer patients’ lives by up to five months[1]. By sharing symptoms as they occur, it is thought that doctors can find a treatment that works.
Scotland’s chief medicine officer, Dr Catherine Calderwood said: “Ensuring that the person receiving care is at the centre of medical decision making it crucial. Getting accurate information from patients about their symptoms at the time they are experiencing them is core to this. This is particularly pertinent for people with cancer. How they feel really matters.”
The other three winners of the Challenge are specifically focused on utilising data to improve patient outcomes.
Edinburgh-based Canon Medical Research is working with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde on a project aimed at building a robust assessment tool for malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM), an asbestos related cancer with a high incidence rate in Scotland.
The second winner, Jayex Technology is working with NHS Lothian on a proof of concept focusing on haematology cancers. With a shortfall of this data, Jayex is hoping to standardise and migrate existing data, from over 30 years of clinical legacy systems, to a new platform.
Lastly, Sharpe Analytics will use machine learning to generate tools for the prediction of outcomes for Scottish cancer patients. The project will start with prognosis modelling for patients with renal cell carcinoma using routinely collected data recorded in repositories such as the Scottish Cancer Registry. This will help increase the accuracy of its models by incorporating additional variables, such as genetic markers influencing the likelihood of tumour development.
With projects such as these being implemented across the UK, it will be interesting to see how effective the digital tools used are at helping clinicians treat cancer patients.
Speaking about the developments taking place across Scotland, minister for Business, Innovation and Energy, Paul Wheelhouse said:
“We are committed to developing Scotland as a centre for innovation, life sciences and world-class clinical research. The £1 million Cancer Innovation Challenge Fund plays a key role in supporting entrepreneurship and new approaches in this crucial area of medicine. This funding will allow these companies to take the next step towards developing new approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of blood, kidney and tissue cancers, using advances in machine learning and automation to deliver better outcomes for patients.”
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2630810?alert=article